Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (25 page)

“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?

He has to remember to breathe. He feels calm and agitated all at once, self-awareness teased to such a screaming pitch that his skull might split at any moment, and he moans, it is just too much to hold in. The realtress glances his way and answers with a sympathy moan. The next moment she steps over and puts her arm around his waist, and they stand so joined, Billy saluting, sweating, standing ramrod straight, the realtress singing with her right hand held to her heart and her left clamped to Billy’s hip.

This lady can really belt it out. Tears the size of lug nuts are tumbling down her cheeks but that’s the kind of thing war does to you. Sensations are heightened, time compressed, passions aroused, and while a single dry-hump might seem a slender reed on which to build a lifetime relationship, Billy would like to think this is where the logic leads. He made Faison tremble, he made her
come,
surely there’s meaning in that. Given all the shifting variables of existence, it’s insane to plan or hope for any one particular thing, yet somehow the world comes to be every day. So if not this, then what? So why not this?