Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (29 page)

Maybe it’s not supposed to make sense. Or maybe not for you, Billy reasons, because you are a duh-umb shit. Then they turn, he’s missed the hash mark by half a beat, the Drill grunts razor-sharp on the mark while Bravo flops around like loose shoelaces. “Change step
march,
” Day woofs sotto voce; as team leader he’s responsible for getting them through halftime with some semblance of their dignity intact, and now he counts time with the Drill grunts, trying to shoehorn the Bravos into lockstep. “Left, left,” the mantra settles Billy’s mind and his feet start to follow, though it would help if he had a weapon in his hands. Just ahead are the Rots, a herd of shambling, big-assed kids, many of them no doubt older than Billy and yet they look so young from the back, their soft, fleshy, baby-fat necks practically screaming for the sacrificial ax to come down.

“Left
face,
” Day softly woofs. They’ve reached the sideline. Bravo steps off seven strides, left face again,
halt
. For the moment their job is to stand next to the Drill grunts and look pretty. High school girls in fringed leotards go skipping past, waving long twirly streamers from six-foot poles. The Prairie View drum line has reconvened at midfield, glide-stepping to the beat of crunchy snare rolls, and everybody except Bravo is moving it seems, the field has become a huge jam-up of hip-hop choreographics and rigid blocks of synchronized marching-band mass. The stage apparatus belches gouts of flame and fireworks as Destiny’s Child ascends with their prancing diva strut. The stage dancers go right on humping like the nastiest video on MTV as Beyoncé and her girls bring the microphones to their lips.

You say you gonna take me there

they sing in kittenish, pouty trills,

Say you know what I need

Show devotion to the notion of our mutual creed

The Drill grunts are doing their thing, snapping their Springfields around in the rock-star version of close order drill.
Chack, chack, chack,
the strike of palm to rifle stock a high-fiber sound, perhaps a skilled listener could follow the stunts just by cadence alone. Out here on the end Billy has only a peripheral view, the rifles flitting in the corner of his eye like cards shuffled and stacked.

You think it all in the moves

Like some robot lover do?

That ain’t the way you get

A grown woman into her groove

Beyoncé slinks one hand down the inside of her thigh, then drags it toward her snatch, not quite cupping herself at the critical point; this is the PG-rated crotch grab, suitable for family viewing. The streamer girls go skipping by, their pale skinny legs like pogo sticks. Those strobes are doing a number on Billy’s head. He narrows his eyes to slits and everything blurs, it is a rat-bite fever dream of soldiers, marching bands, blizzards of bodies bumping and grinding, whoofs of fireworks, multiple drum lines cranking go-team-go. Destiny’s Child! Drill grunts! Toy soldiers and sexytime all mashed together into one big inspirational stew. How many dozens of times has Bravo watched Crack’s Conan DVDs, many dozens, they know every line by heart, and out of all the streamings and veerings of his over-amped brain Billy flashes on the palace orgy scene, James Earl Jones as the snake king sitting on his throne while his stoned minions sprawl about the floor, slurping and licking and humping in glassy-eyed bliss. It creeps him, the overlay of that sludgy sex scene on what he sees before him now, the complete and utter weirdness of the halftime show and the fact that everybody seems okay with it. The stands are packed, the fans are on their feet and everyone is cheering, everything makes them happy today. Fine, be happy, is Billy’s attitude. They can cheer and scream and holler all they want, but it’s nothing, their show, just fluff, filler, it’s got nothing to do with Billy or going back to the war.

I ain’t scared, I’m comin’ through,

I ain’t scared, I ain’t scared,

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

In the stands behind the stage a huge American flag appears, a card stunt, each one of a mass of twenty thousand fans comprising a pixel in this antique special effect. The cards spin, and now the flag is presented as if rippling in the wind, though on second look it’s more like the thing’s been badly pressed, the pattern gashed through with wrinkles and kinks. For several moments Billy’s eyes play tricks with it, tweaking the perspective back and forth, then his inner ear jolts and the ground seems to tilt, a lurch that sets him down in a different place. It occurs to him that maybe he’s wrong. Maybe the halftime show is as real as anything; what if some power or potent agency lives in it? Not a show but a means to something, something conferred or invoked. A ceremony. Something religious, so long as “religious” extends to such cold-blooded concepts as mayhem, chance, nature out of control. He feels the pull of a superseding reality that trumps even the experiential truths of a grunt on the ground—the blood on your hands, the burn in your lungs, the stink of your unwashed feet. Merely thinking about it sets off a pounding in his skull, not his headache but a heavier sonar throb deep in the lower brain stem. And very clearly the thought comes to him,
that’s where it lives
. The god in your head, all the gods—is that what’s happening here? He’s too self-conscious and church-averse to accept a completely straight notion of god, so how about this—chemicals, hormones, needs and drives, whatever is in us that’s so supreme and terrifying that we have to call it divine.

Lemme break it down for you again,

Stop actin’ like a boy, stand up and be a man,

What’s sad is all your talkin’ ’bout love and affection,

You get yours and leave me hangin’ like a prepubescent

Billy is cold where the warmest part of him should be, as if meaning naturally registers first in the most delicate instrument he has, his balls. He’s scared. He knows this is a bad place to be. They love to talk up God and country but it’s the devil they propose, all those busy little biochemical devils of sex and death and war that simmer at the base of the skull, punch up the heat a few degrees and they rise to a boil, spill over the sides. Do they even know? he wonders. Maybe they don’t know what they know, given that what he sees before him is so random, so perfect, porn-lite out of its mind on martial dope. Short of blood sacrifice or actual sex on the field, you couldn’t devise a better spectacle for turning up the heat.

Left face,
Day softly woofs, and they step off,
right face
and they’re crossing the field toward the belly of the beast, Lodis following Billy, Billy following Crack, Crack following Day, who tails the Prairie View drum corps through a blur of fancy uniforms and bared flesh. Individual sounds spire out of the din like guitar drones, the squeanings of whales. Time gears down to a lower speed. The strobes pulse in stretchy Day-Glo smears. Billy knows where they’re supposed to end up though he’s vague on the mechanics of getting there. As each Bravo crosses the sideline they face left, then they’re hustled along a gauntlet of stressed-out handlers to a chaotic holding pen behind the stage. A tall slender woman in a knee-length parka pulls the Bravos out of line. She’s pretty, at least the part of her that shows between the flaps of her Russian officer’s cap. “All right,” she says, gathering the Bravos into a huddle, yelling like a sailor in a gale, “we’re gonna get you guys in position backstage, then when we give you the go you step out and take the stairs down to the middle level. You’ll be marching, right? Like this?” She mimes a military strut. “You turn left on the middle tier and march out along there. Look for the purple X’s, one for each of you, that’s your mark. Then just turn and face the field and stand at attention.”

The Bravos nod. No one speaks. They’re all quietly freaking.

“There’s gonna be a lot going on out there but you guys don’t move. That’s your job, just stand there. No-brainer, right?” She smiles, gives Day a light cuff on the shoulder. “You guys okay?”

The Bravos nod. Even Day seems rattled, his neck bulging like he’s swallowed too much air. Crack is looking at the ground and mumbling to himself.

“Guys, come on, chill, you’ve got the easy part.” The woman laughs, exasperated by how tight they are. “Once you’re on your mark just stay there till the show’s over, I’ll come up and give you the all-clear.”

“This about to be
stoopih,
” Lodis grumbles, but the handler lady pretends not to hear. Bravos can deal, you bet, though none of them is looking particularly good at the moment. There’s too many people running around, too much bug-eyed panic, all the freak-out flavors of an ambush situation without any of the compensating murderous release. Fireworks crews to their left and right keep shooting off nasty little rockets that hiss and sizzle like RPGs. Portable sets of metal stairs lead up to the highest stage level, and the Bravos are placed at the tops of these stairways, one Bravo per. A narrow catwalk is all that separates them from the stage backdrop, and Billy is standing there, a step below catwalk level, when a magnificent female creature bombs through the backdrop, it is a louvered sort of opening she steps around as several handlers swarm in. One takes her microphone, another offers Evian, a third presents some sort of small, furry garment that the woman proceeds to pull over her head. Beyoncé. If Billy chooses he could reach out and touch her thigh. Her hair springs free of the pullover like a solar flare, and from Billy’s vantage point a foot below the catwalk she towers with a Rocky Mountain majesty. Up close her skin is the honeyed brown of apple butter, limned with a film of perspiration that holds the light. Michelle and Kelly have their own handlers farther down the catwalk. No one speaks. They are all business, these show people, as quiet and lethal as sniper teams. Beyoncé shoots her arms through the sleeves of the jacket, a cropped, off-shoulder sateen number with a fur-trimmed collar, and as she arranges herself inside the garment her eyes meet Billy’s. Excuse me, he wants to say, go on, go on, she’s so focused and fierce in the moment that he’s sorry to impinge even to this small extent. Carrying the show in front of forty million people makes her one of the top human beings on the planet, and what strength of nerve that must take, what freakish concentrations of soul and energy. She’s not even winded! A yogic mastery of the mind-body balance. She inhabits some far distant astral plane, yet her eyes do something when they meet his, for an instant he seems to register there. In that split second Billy searches for something in her look—not mercy, exactly, nothing so grand as compassion, maybe just a bare acknowledgment of their shared humanity, but she’s already turning, she takes the mike and one of the handlers is saying
kick butt
as she steps through the slot and disappears.

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: